The 2009 GQ Reading List

Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem

Our tour guide through the stellar, multilayered novel, Chronic City, is Chase Insteadman (cf. Everyman), a former child star living off handsome residuals. Not having much to do, he putters around town generally hoping to get laid or stoned—which he does in equal parts. The title is inspired partly by that potent brand of marijuana Dr. Dre made famous; in fact, many of Insteadman and his friends’ earnest explorations have the quality of a long night of pot smoking. As one character proposes, perhaps everyone is actually living in a universe rendered by a computer. Such suspicions, presented as both paranoid and sensible, add a subtle undercurrent of creepiness to this novel, which is as much about Insteadman’s quest for love and friendship as it is about the slow unraveling of a metropolis. If it’s at all possible to be good-naturedly apocalyptic, Lethem comes close. This might be the best we can hope for these days.—saÏd sayrafiezadeh

Buy it: 10.13.09

The Great Fall Read: Blame by Michelle Huneven

A woman wakes up in jail and shrugs. Another bender, but this time the cops aren’t smiling. Patsy, a 29-year-old history professor with a powerful thirst and a brand-new Ph.D., has a newer, bigger problem: A mother and daughter are dead, run over in Patsy’s driveway, and she reacts the way anybody would, wishing instead that it was her, wanting to atone. There are so many eye-popping scenes I would need to take my shoes off to count them.

The author of two previous novels, Michelle Huneven has received rave reviews. But here she works with such intensity—as Patsy moves through booze whore to prison wench to a fractured person crackling with epiphanies—that she just may have broken out of the realm of quiet critical acclaim.—matthew klam

Buy it: 09.09.09

The Original of Laura by Vladmir Nabokov

It takes guts to defy the dying wish of a parent. Particularly when that parent is Vladimir Nabokov and the dying wish has to do with the disposition of his unfinished final manuscript. That wish, communicated from his deathbed in 1977, was straightforward: Burn it. Yet thirty years later, Dmitri Nabokov, the ecutor of his father’s estate, has chosen to do the opposite. In November he will publish The Original of Laura—or rather, the 138 note cards that make up the first draft of the novel, which is about, wait for it, a self-hating man and a young girl. Dmitri’s defense? His father’s ghost appeared before him in a dream and told him to do it. Who was he to argue?—sarah goldstein

Buy it: 11.17.09

A (Bulimic) Food Critic Coughs Up the Truth: Born Round by Frank Bruni

In his unusually revealing new memoir, Born Round, Frank Bruni—the elusive New York Times restaurant critic who once slapped David Bouley down a star for fumbling the table service—peels back the aluminum foil on his long relationship with unhealthy eating. As an 8-year-old, he was already on the Atkins Diet; by college, he was bulimic. At 268 pounds (“I looked like Jabba the Hut,” he says), he became so unsightly that Maureen Dowd hired him a personal trainer. No surprise he nearly refused the Restaurant Critic column—a job requiring that he eat out seven nights a week, with an annual restaurant allowance of $150,000, a glutton’s wet dream. On some nights, after an exquisite $200 meal at Le Bernardin, he cops to stopping for a pint of Ben & Jerry’s or a whole rotisserie chicken, somehow packing it all in at once. The feeling of near explosion, he explains, gives him a high. “There are as many people out there who have a fraught relationship with food as a gauzy, romantic one,” he says.—david france

Buy it: 08.20.09

The Tao of Wu, by RZA

Want to know what ODB was doing eight hours before his addiction to crack dispatched him to hell? Ever wondered how the philosophies of prison Islam got into the homes of hip-hop-loving white kids in the ’90s? If you answered yes, dabble in rap music, or even just loved The Wire, you’ll want to check out The Tao of Wu, a memoir by Wu-Tang Clan producer and leader the RZA. It’s part hip-hop-history lesson and part survival course, straight from the grimiest borough (Staten Island) in the grimiest decade (the 1980s). You’ll read it in an afternoon. Don’t believe? Try this on: What ODB was doing eight hours before he died was forcing his son to watch him smoke crack.—will welch

The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave

In the annals of superfluous creative crossovers, Nick Cave is gloriously immune. Whatever it is he’s working on—a screenplay, an opera, a new Bad Seeds record—isn’t merely an attempt to prove he can hold his own in another genre; it’s a means to express his restless literary soul. This month he’ll release his second novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, about the last days of a comically lascivious, vagina-obsessed salesman.—mark healy

Buy it: 09.08.09

Eddie Campbell: A Scottish Cartoonist (Really) You Should Know About

A 640-page semi-autobiography by the Scottish cartoonist known for illustrating Alan Moore’s From Hell? We know—you’re semi-excited. But trust us: Eddie Campbell’s Alec, a mammoth collection of the comics Campbell has written and drawn about himself and his alter ego, Alec MacGarry, is a profound piece. Nothing much happens: Campbell/Alec starts out as a wannabe artist, sinks a few thousand pints of beer, gets married and has kids, and sees a book he drew become a motion picture starring Johnny Depp. After a while, he’s older and (slightly) wiser, addressing young Alec directly: “Everybody will be full of unfulfillable promise in the cheery winesodden Friday afternoon of your life when you feel an unbearable nostalgia for events less than a day after they happen.…Just see if the Monday morning of your life don’t arrive like a broken elevator.” If you’re reading this, you’re on that journey from Friday to Monday, lifewise; Campbell makes it feel like the greatest adventure imaginable.—alex pappademas

Buy it: 10.14.09

The Big, Big History Book: A Fiery Peace in a Cold War by Neil Sheehan

Neil Sheehan, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning history of America’s involvement in Vietnam, A Bright Shining Lie, now turns his attention to the Cold War. More specifically, to the intercontinental ballistic missile. The ICBM was the culmination of years of work by a convocation of driven geniuses the likes of which are rarely seen in history. (The glory days of Silicon Valley some decades later are a less bellicose paradigm-shifting analogue.) The truly revolutionary aspect of the ICBM was the notion of deterrence: Its very existence was the assurance it would never be used. In A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, Sheehan’s scope is vast, and the narrative proceeds with the measured beauty of a complex mathematical proof. Particularly fascinating is his contention that much of the Cold War was predicated on an early misreading of Stalin’s intentions for Euro domination. If there is any nostalgia here, it is for a time when the concept of mutually assured destruction was limited to just two countries. —david rakoff

Buy it: 09.22.09

The Best Description of the Way We Deny the Certainty of Death: From E. L. Doctorow’s novel Homer & Langley

"And then there was that feeling one gets in a ride to a cemetery trailing a body in a coffin—an impatience with the dead, a longing to be back home where one could get on with the illusion that not death but daily life is the permanent condition."

Buy it: 09.01.09

Proof That Robert Altman’s Parenting Skills Were Not As Enviable as His Filmmaking

From Mitchell Zuckoff’s juicy Robert Altman: The Oral Biography

"[When] I was around 10…he told us all that if…he had to choose between all of us and his work, he’d dump us in a second. We were like, ‘Oh, okay.’ And we went back to playing."—Stephen Altman, one of six children

Buy it: 10.19.09

Ken

Googled by Ken Auletta

Ken Auletta’s smart 400-page Googled takes on the rise of one of the most polarizing companies of our time. It’s an exploration of good and evil, strategic progress in a time of extreme technological flux, and the inspiring possibility of building something sublime from computer code. For those with a short commute or a mad-out attention span, the highlights.—howie kahn

Google’s original name was BackRub, then Googol (taken), then the WhatBox, which they decided against because it sounded like WetBox, which sounds like, well...

In 1999 one-quarter of all Google searches were for porn. Engineers who figured out how to make porn harder to retrieve were rewarded with (actual) cookies.

New employees at Google are called “Nooglers.” They wear propeller-top beanies.

The problem with covering the Iraq war (besides the dissolution of the newspaper industry and, um, reporting) is dealing with Iraq fatigue—that calcified deposit blocking the compassion centers. David Finkel—whose The Good Soldiers is about a battalion deployed for fourteen months during the surge—takes on fatigue with reporting. He gets to know these guys well enough, and writes about them well enough, to flood the compassion center. I can’t stop thinking about the Iraqi translator trying to hail a taxi after a bombing while his daughter was bleeding to death. Or the soldier in a burn unit, whose 19-year-old wife must tell him that three of his limbs have been blown off. A whole generation of these men will (God willing) be coming home, and The Good Soldiers is as good a guide as I can imagine to who they’ll be when they get here.—devin friedman

Our tour guide through the stellar, multilayered novel, Chronic City, is Chase Insteadman (cf. Everyman), a former child star living off handsome residuals. Not having much to do, he putters around town generally hoping to get laid or stoned—which he does in equal parts. The title is inspired partly by that potent brand of marijuana Dr. Dre made famous; in fact, many of Insteadman and his friends’ earnest explorations have the quality of a long night of pot smoking. As one character proposes, perhaps everyone is actually living in a universe rendered by a computer. Such suspicions, presented as both paranoid and sensible, add a subtle undercurrent of creepiness to this novel, which is as much about Insteadman’s quest for love and friendship as it is about the slow unraveling of a metropolis. If it’s at all possible to be good-naturedly apocalyptic, Lethem comes close. This might be the best we can hope for these days.—saÏd sayrafiezadeh